Traditionally, career paths for budding lawyers have been limited – pupillage at chambers hopefully followed by a tenancy, or articles at a law firm culminating in an associate position.

But, in Tony Blair's words, there may now be a 'third way'. The 'legal information engineer' – no longer a concept confined to the writing of Richard Susskind – is fast becoming a viable option for young lawyers looking for an alternative form of employment.

One such lawyer, Matthew di Rienzo, is a key figure behind the creation of Clifford Chance's (CC) NextLaw online advice system.

Di Rienzo, 28, qualified as a barrister, but decided to quit his pupillage at Queen Elizabeth Buildings in the middle of 1994, initially seeking a return to academia in the shape of a masters degree followed by a PhD in English or philosophy.

But along the way he was side-tracked. Looking to make some money to fund his foray back to university, di Rienzo, a Cambridge law graduate, became involved with the newly formed legal publisher, New Law.

Di Rienzo says he was initially brought in to help create digests of judgments, but "by the end of that year, 1995, I had designed the company's online legal information service – an online mechanism on the Internet for delivering same-day judgments".

According to di Rienzo, by the time the online system was finally released in April 1996, it was the first fully Internet-based legal information service in the UK.

And, after spending time working with an "inspirational" German programmer at New Law, di Rienzo says he was hooked. "I discovered a love of computers and technology," he says.

While working on New Law's online service, di Rienzo came across Clifford Chance and Christopher Millard, the partner in charge of NextLaw, for the first time. CC was interested in the service, and Millard did some of the legal work for New Law.

By the end of 1997, di Rienzo was working for CC as a consultant on the NextLaw project.
"I was invited to come and work for them," he says. "When I came in, NextLaw was at a relatively early stage in terms of implementation.

There had been some projects the firm had been working on which needed to be integrated.
"It was quite a quick process.

I spent a month getting to know the firm and the information in NextLaw. I came up with a design and started the development process at the end of 1997, and NextLaw was officially launched at the beginning of May last year."

After the implementation of NextLaw, Clifford Chance and di Rienzo made their relationship permanent.
Last August, di Rienzo became online services research and development manager, working directly for Colin Potter, the partner in charge of online services at Clifford Chance.

He also works closely with Susskind, who, among his many jobs, acts as consultant to the firm.
"Obviously NextLaw was the first online service implemented by Clifford Chance, but as part of the commitment to further developments in this area we realised we needed a full-time role to systematically look at opportunities and design concepts," di Rienzo says.

He says his "wish to pursue academic work has not died", but he gets a great deal of intellectual fulfilment from his job.
"It's about structuring information. Making it easily available. There is a massive information overload people are presented with – not just through the Internet, but newspapers and broadcasting.

I'm fascinated by the ways technology can manage that overload and filter out its key aspects.
"It's particularly crucial in a business environment. Clients of Clifford Chance and other major law firms are busy, stressed people, who don't have time to sift through the vast array of information with which they are confronted.

"They need to get very quickly at what counts for them, usually what gives them a business advantage or ensures they comply with legal regulations."
Di Rienzo says he also satisfies his academic leanings through his work for the Society for Computers and Law (SCL).

He helped draft the SCL response to the Lord Chancellor's Departments (LCD) Civil Justice consultation paper, which called on the Government to provide free access to the law via the Internet.
"It's something I believe in," he says.

"The rule of law is central to society, and knowing the law and having access to law should be standard and seen as a right, and law comes from judgments and from statute, so people should have access."

However, di Rienzo stresses his old publisher colleagues will not suffer, because they add the value necessary to make law understandable. "It goes back to a process of filtering.

The publisher can guide the citizen or business through categorising the law and providing layman's summaries."
And it is here where di Rienzo sees the role of the publisher and the role of the law firm coming together.

He says the role of law firms will increasingly centre on making law understandable and available to its business clients through the Internet.

"The information at New Law was aimed at lawyers and was quite legalistic. What's important for a firm like Clifford Chance is to move away from services that are legalistic in basis, but are instead more business-focused.

That's the key, because there is no point producing a legal textbook online.
"The client doesn't need to know what the law is, only how the law relates to their practical circumstances, and what they need to do to make sure they're compliant.

That requires a quite different approach, and that's certainly the angle from which I come when looking at these systems.

"We are not in the business of practising law academically, we are providing business solutions.

In the future we will become so close to our clients – because we want to service them in the best way possible – that some of our business processes will accord with theirs, particularly in the legal and compliance areas."

He says it will also be the role of the law firm to tell clients when there are changes to the law or regulations rather than waiting for the client to come to them.
"Lawyers will become much more like business consultants for their clients. They won't just be reactive, they won't necessarily charge by the hour or minute at the end of a telephone.

"They will be proactive, in constant contact with their clients, re-engineering the processes by which their clients remain compliant with the increasingly vast array of regulations that beset them."
Di Rienzo is adamant that there has been little resistance from lawyers at CC to the idea of turning the firm's valuable legal advice into a commodity.

"At Clifford Chance there has never been hostility to the idea internally, but a recognition of the usefulness and potential power of online services. The particular interest has been in trying to identify the right services.

"There has been in some circles, not necessarily here but in the industry as a whole, the perception that lawyers will be replaced by computers. That's highly unlikely. It may be that some lawyers are replaced by computers, but not all.

"You will still need human contact. As long as people are making deals, you'll need human lawyers and advisers because it's part of a primeval process."